Ed Bruske is a Washington Post reporter turned caterer
and urban farmer. He's also a concerned father: when he found out what his
daughter was being fed at a D.C. public school, Ed turned his discoveries into
a series on his blog, TheSlowCook.com. On his website, now three years strong,
he tracks the issues surrounding school lunches, urban farming, and food
justice. Originally from a Chicago suburb, a few of the things he loves most
about living in a city are neighborhood restaurants, public libraries, and
walking to the grocery store.

How did you first become interested in what your daughter was being fed at
school?

When we had her attending a charter school, my 10-year-old daughter had been
taking her lunch with her. When we switched her to H.D. Cooke Elementary we
were concerned because she started putting on weight.

But writing about the school on
my blog actually came about purely accidentally. I didn't go in there planning
to be a reporter--I actually signed up to be on the advisory board of the new
D.C. Farm to School Network. After I got
out of reporting and did catering for a while, I started teaching about food,
gardening on a large scale at our house, building a garden at my daughter's
school, and getting involved with D.C. urban gardeners.

So I was sitting at a meeting
with the school principal talking about school gardens and the subject of
pre-made versus fresh food in schools came up. I said, "Well, you have a
kitchen here where you make all the meals, I'd love to be a fly on the wall and
write this up on my blog." I appeared the next morning and expected to see
food being made from scratch. It was the exact opposite.

I'm sure from the school system's point of view this was the worst thing
that could happen: a former newspaper reporter, who's also a parent, stumbles
into the kitchen and writes this expose of what they're serving. The morning
after I posted first piece, the phone rang and it was the principal asking me
what I'd written. The kitchen director had passed it along, and the principal
was a little flummoxed by it. Since then, the kitchen manager has been
reassigned.

What are some of the biggest food issues facing urban schools today?

I was kind of bowled over when I watched Jamie Oliver's show. When he was
wagging the little piece of chicken at the lunch ladies I said, "Dang,
that's the same stuff we're serving here." What he found there is exactly
the same stuff I found in the D.C. school. There's this bifurcation of the food
system here: you have privileged kids getting the great food we're all talking
about, while the great unwashed masses out there have to eat tater tots and
scraps processed into nuggets and ammonia-washed beef with phony grill marks on
it. They're getting the worst of what our industrial food service has to offer.

The parents don't go inside because they're not encouraged to. The
"nutritional requirements" in schools have all kinds of loopholes.
You can pack as much "nutrition" you want into the food, and it's still junk.
For example, breakfast at my daughter's school is applejacks, strawberry milk,
and Pop Tarts. When you add it all up, the kids are eating more than a quarter
cup of sugar for breakfast.

After seeing the industrially processed, frozen foods fed to the kids in D.C.,
I wanted to see if there was a district doing just the opposite. So I called
the food services director at Martin Luther King, bought a plane ticket, and
flew out there to spend a week as a kitchen lady. I had the apron, latex,
gloves, hair net--which I eventually switched out for a baseball cap from UC
Berkeley bookstore.

They had me working jobs all over the kitchen, called the Dining Commons, which
is about the size of a basketball court. This is all the result of an effort
that the parents, Alice Waters, and the school were involved in to start
serving fresh meals. They passed a bond initiative to build a new central
kitchen and cooking facility for all 16 schools in the Berkeley School
District. The place looks like a little lodge from Yosemite National Park, and
it's where they cook meals for all 9,100 kids in the district.

I called my first blog piece on the trip "The Epic Chicken," because
as opposed to the reheated chicken tenders most schools serve, Berkeley gets
great big bricks of eight-cut chicken, which takes a total of eight days to
prepare and serve to the kids. This is a city where people burned their draft
cards--this is the ultimate in radical U.S. cities, and up until five years ago
their kids were eating the same food the rest of the country was. The parents
were really upset, and so through an inclusive, transparent process they formed
a committee and worked out what they wanted to do. Then they hired
professionals to come in and do it. It's the perfect example of at least one
community overcoming this notion that it just can't be done.

Would you describe yourself as an activist?An angry white man, you mean? I'm kind of in a lather today because in my
daughter's school this morning, you know what the kids were getting for
breakfast? A piece of bread and some potatoes. The pre-cooked scrambled eggs
from Minnesota that were on the menu? They didn't have them in. I posted about
it and sent the link to the D.C. Farm to School Google group where it was
denied--they don't want "negative stuff" coming up all the time.

Do you see a relationship between urban farming and the health of cities?

We may find out, in ways we don't really want to know, how urban farms
impact cities. The question is going to be: Are we headed for a time when
people are really going to depend on being able grow food in the city?
Are we going to have a Cuba experience here where we have to turn our yards and
rooftops and city parks into food gardens? People don't have the incentive
right now to do that. The future will depend a lot on how we deal with the
energy issue. If it gets too expensive to fly asparagus in from Chile in the
winter, people might be more motivated.

As a fairly large-scale urban farmer, do you meet resistance to the view
that food should be grown in cities?

I've had many interesting conversations with people over the fence stopping
to look and talk about how their grandmother used to grow food like we do,
people who have copied the garden, etc. But then you've got a few people who
are concerned about their property values and who get really upset to see a
farm in the neighborhood. I think most people are cool with it, but there are
people out there who see this as something that does not belong in the city.

We also have a movement to try to change the law to be friendlier toward
having backyard chickens. When I was in Berkeley, I stayed with a family that
had nine chickens. We had fresh eggs every morning. But there are a lot of
people who think that that's just not something that should be happening in a
city like Washington. I think the resistance or support has to do with the
individual culture of the city you're living in. I think D.C. is still finding
out its food culture.

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